Romanists and Protestants differ as to how many books constitute the Canon, the former including the so-called Apocrypha—­books in the Greek translation but not in the original Hebrew Bible.  And they differ more fundamentally in the principle underlying the selection of the books.  The Roman Catholic holds that it is the Church which officially has made the Bible, while the Protestant insists that the books possess spiritual qualities of their own which gave them their place in the authoritative volume, a place which the Church merely recognized.  Luther, in his celebrated dispute with Dr. Eck, asserted:  “The Church cannot give more authority or force to a book than it has in itself.  A Council cannot make that be Scripture which in its own nature is not Scripture.”  The Council of Trent, answering the Reformers, in 1546, issued an official decree defining what is Scripture:  “The holy, ecumenical and general Synod of Trent, legitimately convened in the Holy Ghost ...receives and venerates with an equal piety and reverence all the books as well of the Old as of the New Testament ...together with the traditions pertaining both to faith and to morals, as proceeding from the mouth of Christ, or dictated by the Holy Spirit, and preserved in the Church Catholic by continuous succession.”  Then follows a catalogue of the books, and an anathema on all who shall not receive them “as they are contained in the old vulgate Latin version.”

Over against this the Protestant takes the position that the books of the Scripture came to be recognized as authoritative exactly as Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth have been accorded their place in English literature.  It was the inherent merit of Hamlet and Paradise Lost and the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality that led to their acknowledgment.  No official body has made Shakespeare a classic; his works have won their own place.  No company of men of letters officially organized keeps him in his eminent position; his plays keep themselves.  The books of the Bible have gained their positions because they could not be barred from them; they possess power to recanonize themselves.  Some are much less valuable than others, and it is, perhaps, a debatable question whether one or two of the apocryphal books—­First Maccabees, or Ecclesiasticus, for instance—­are not as spiritually useful as the Song of Solomon or Esther; but of the chief books we may confidentially affirm that, if one of them were dug up for the first time today, it would gradually win a commanding place in Christian thought.  And it is a similar social experience of the Church—­Jewish and Christian—­which has recognized their worth.  The modernist Tyrrell has written:  “It cannot be denied that in the life of that formless Church, which underlies the hierarchic organization, God’s Spirit exercises a silent but sovereign criticism, that His resistlessly effectual judgment is made known, not in the precise language of definition and decree, but in the slow manifestation of practical results; in the survival of what has proved itself life-giving; in the decay and oblivion of all whose value was but relative and temporary.”